Xbox CTO Says Major Outage Was 'Unacceptable' and is 'Running a Full Post-Incident Review' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 28 July 2026 / 1,707 Views
On Monday, July 27 there was a Xbox major outage that meant players on Xbox were unable sign-in, view their library, and to play some games for most of the day. Xbox chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet in a lengthy post on social media explained the situation and said the team at Xbox is working on ways to prevent this from happening again in the future.
"Earlier today, many players began experiencing issues with sign in, enumerating their game libraries and playing games," said Vliet. "The team has worked hard throughout the day to fix the issue, and we've restored service as of 2:30 PM PDT. Nonetheless, this is an unacceptable situation, and we must do better to support you.
"Over the coming weeks, you'll hear more from me about our services, our platform, and the work we're doing to make XBOX better. And that starts with some transparency about this incident."
He explained there was a third-party service outside of Xbox that it depends upon to provide licensing that began failing. As the team worked on a fix service returned unevenly across regions over several hours.
"Late last night, a licensing service that sits outside of XBOX, but which XBOX depends upon, began failing," said Vliet. "This caused some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail, such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own. It also affected several of our publishing and store partners who depend on those same systems which is why some of you saw issues in specific games and not others.
"Our on-call teams caught the first signals overnight through automated monitoring and declared a major incident. Once we isolated the failing infrastructure, we shifted traffic onto the healthy parts of the system while the team continued to work towards a root cause. Service came back unevenly across regions which is why some of you recovered hours before others."
Vliet added the team is working on a full review on the incident and working on ways of preventing this happening again.
"We're running a full post-incident review. I care less about the one-line root cause and more about the real questions: why a failure in one service was able to take down this much, why recovery took as long as it did, and what we change so a single point of failure can't ruin your night again. That means hardening the dependencies underneath sign in and game launch, improving how we detect and contain this class of failure, and being faster and clearer with you when something breaks.
"Thank you for your patience, and for the reports that genuinely helped us narrow this down. We'll do better."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Glorious digital only future
Heard about Sony's PSN outage but not this one
No one noticed!
Good that Xbox keeps their customers up to date with the outages.
Customer*
Weird... I played a game on game pass for about an hour yesterday morning (6am pacific time) and played another game this morning (again 6am pacific time) and never experienced any issues. And never heard about it until this article.
Go Anonymous!
